Meta-analysis of quantitative sleep parameters from childhood to old age in healthy individuals: developing normative sleep values across the human lifespan.

By M. Ohayon, M. Carskadon, C. Guilleminault, M. Vitiello. Sleep, 2004

3,200 citations recorded by the source corpus.

OBJECTIVES The purposes of this study were to identify age-related changes in objectively recorded sleep patterns across the human life span in healthy individuals and to clarify whether sleep latency and percentages of stage 1, stage 2, and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep significantly change with age. DESIGN Review of literature of articles published between 1960 and 2003 in peer-reviewed journals and meta-analysis. PARTICIPANTS 65 studies representing 3,577 subjects aged 5 years to 102 years. MEASUREMENT The research reports included in this meta-analysis met the following criteria: (1) included nonclinical participants aged 5 years or older; (2) included measures of sleep characteristics by "all night" polysomnography or actigraphy on sleep latency, sleep efficiency, total sleep time, stage 1 sleep, stage 2 sleep, slow-wave sleep, REM sleep, REM latency, or minutes awake after sleep onset; (3) included numeric presentation of the data; and (4) were published between 1960 and 2003 in peer-reviewed journals. RESULTS In children and adolescents, total sleep time decreased with age only in studies performed on school days. Percentage of slow-wave sleep was significantly negatively correlated with age. Percentages of stage 2 and REM sleep significantly changed with age. In adults, total sleep time, sleep efficiency, percentage of slow-wave sleep, percentage of REM sleep, and REM latency all significantly decreased with age, while sleep latency, percentage of stage 1 sleep, percentage of stage 2 sleep, and wake after sleep onset significantly increased with age. However, only sleep efficiency continued to significantly decrease after 60 years of age. The magnitudes of the effect sizes noted changed depending on whether or not studied participants were screened for mental disorders, organic diseases, use of drug or alcohol, obstructive sleep apnea syndrome, or other sleep disorders. CONCLUSIONS In adults, it appeared that sleep latency, percentages of stage 1 and stage 2 significantly increased with age while percentage of REM sleep decreased. However, effect sizes for the different sleep parameters were greatly modified by the quality of subject screening, diminishing or even masking age associations with different sleep parameters. The number of studies that examined the evolution of sleep parameters with age are scant among school-aged children, adolescents, and middle-aged adults. There are also very few studies that examined the effect of race on polysomnographic sleep parameters.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Physiology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/757d7cb701ea5e734af50e8d700ecb763359cd57

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

Citations in the corpus

The effects of physical activity on sleep: a meta-analytic review (2015, result): “Interestingly, this finding is in line with and could possibly be reflective of general age-related changes in sleep; studies suggest that in general, sleep onset latency slightly increases with age (Ohayon et al., 2004).”
Sleep disturbances increase the risk of dementia: A systematic review and meta-analysis. (2017, methodology): “The studies that w ere included in this meta-analysis were screened for the following inclusion criteria: (1) evaluated associations between sleep disturbances and dementia, (2) diagnosed dementia b ased on international diagnostic criteria and actual medical records, (3) performed a longitu dinal s”
An open-source, high-performance tool for automated sleep staging (2021, background): “Thereafter, and algorithm termed ‘Z3Score’ ( Patanaik et al., 2018 ) was published, trained and evaluated on ~1700 PSG recordings from four datasets.”
Age and gender-related neurophysiological changes in sleep and wake states during childhood (2026, unknown): “From infancy to adolescence, total sleep duration gradually decreases, with a reduction in deep sleep (slow wave sleep, SWS or N3) and REM sleep, while lighter sleep stages (N1 and N2) increase in proportion (Agostini and Centofanti, 2021; Ohayon et al., 2004).”
The maturation of aperiodic EEG activity across development reveals a progressive differentiation of wakefulness from sleep (2023, unknown): “Noteworthy, an effect of age on the exponent might have been observed in NREM sleep, if considered as a whole (N2+N3), but this effect could simply be explained by the reduction of the prevalence of N3 during development (Ohayon et al., 2004).”